Many businesses spend small fortunes to establish and promote their brands. Last year, Merrill Lynch, for example, spent about a half-a-billion dollars on marketing and business development. Imagine Merrill's new challenge: Come April, Merrill...
Money manager Jim Rogers was ahead of the pack through most of his career. In his younger days, he helped make George Soros into the billionaire hedge fund titan. In recent years, Rogers operated two successful commodity funds. And, in the early...
Critics lambaste mutual funds, calling them old-fashioned contraptions that generate big tax bills. It's true, on average, that exchange-traded funds and separate accounts have tax advantages over mutual funds, data from Morningstar and other...
Back during the buying panic of the 1990s, it was fashionable to believe: Sell your losers, and run with your winners. Of course, one of the lessons of the subsequent crack up: Don't let your winners run so much that they dominate your portfolio...
Dedicated followers of the Clipper Fund may have been dismayed when longtime managers James Gipson and Michael Sandler left the fund recently. For many investors, the Clipper crew represented the best in value investing. During the past decade...
Wall Street is a place where trends can cycle nearly as fast as they do in the fashion world, but in the post-bubble years, investors are treating dividend stocks like the always-flattering basic black. To meet the demand from dividend-hungry...
When Ross Perot ran for president in 1992, the Texas billionaire revealed his simple investing strategy: He had put nearly everything into municipal bonds. The approach violated textbook advice that urges investors to hold diversified portfolios...
David Swensen is one of America's greatest investors. As chief investment officer of Yale University, he has produced what has been described as an unparalleled two-decade investment record, averaging 16.1 percent annual returns for the school...